The 1912 song Dolly Parton will never get tired of: “I always cling to them”
When you’ve amassed the kind of hits that Dolly Parton has, it’s hard to keep track of every single song in the catalogue.
Not every one of her tunes needed to be an absolute smash by any means, but when you look at the way that she was crafting her songs, writing a couple of lines was like second nature to her every single time she made her tunes. But even after having to sing tunes like ‘Jolene’ for half a decade at this point, Parton felt that there were some songs that were never going to wear out their welcome for sentimental reasons.
But when you look through a lot of her best work, a lot of it comes down to more than just her voice. Every one of her old tunes was a slice-of-life story, and even if she admitted that there were a few suckers in her discography, she wasn’t afraid to own up to them, either. Not every song can be a winner, but the ones that stick around are usually the ones that have a lot more of a personal angle behind them.
You can really feel the heartache in a tune like ‘I Will Always Love You’, and that’s only because Parton was heartbroken at having to leave Porter Wagoner behind. It was all done for the right reasons, but it’s not like that was going to make the pain hurt any less, knowing that one of her greatest partners in crime suddenly wasn’t going to be around anymore.
She could weather any storm that she came across on her own, but when looking through some of her salad days, she had faith that she could sing long before she went professional. Her beginnings started in the church, and even if she wasn’t always going to make gospel records or anything like that, she had no problem reminding people of where her religious roots were every now and again.
Then again, Parton wasn’t even the only one bringing religion into the equation. Elvis Presley had turned towards making gospel records countless times throughout his career, so what was the problem with her professing her faith every now and again? All of that was well and good, but even if Parton wrote a few faith-based songs, she felt that nothing got better than the songs that she was hearing in church, like ‘Love Lifted Me’.
The song is well over 100 years old at this point, but as long as it still had the power that it did when Parton first heard it, she was always going to keep listening, saying, “Growing up most of the songs Momma sang for us were faith-based and I always cling to them as, like this hymn, they remind me so much of my childhood and great memories of my family.” And you can draw a throughline from there to a lot of Parton’s favourite songs in the secular market as well.
She had no problem calling ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ one of her all-time favourite songs, and a lot of that came down to the way that George Jones delivered it. He had the same kind of conviction that those old gospel singers did, and if she was going to make a name for herself, she was going to want to do it in the same way that everyone else was whenever she was praising her higher power.
So while most religious-based music these days could be classified as too preachy or simply too ho-hum for most people, that doesn’t mean that every single one of those gospel singers was terrible, too. It was all about the presentation, and you could feel Parton have those same feelings she did when she first fell in love with music on a song like this.
